Chapter IV: Part 4

He did not rekindle his lamp, but sat, laying the forgotten match-box on his table, and looking out into the blackness of the yawning night. The wind that had extinguished his light had died away again, and all round he heard the heavy plump of the rain, which was beginning to fall heavily. Before five minutes were past, the sluices of the sky were fully open again, and the downpour had become torrential. The lightning, that an hour ago had but winked remotely on the horizon, was becoming more vivid, and the response of the thunder more immediate. At the gleam of the frequent flashes from the sky, the trees in front of the bungalow, the road, and the fields that lay beyond it, started into colour seen through the veil of the rain, that hung like a curtain of glass beads, firm and perpendicular, and then vanished again into the impenetrable blackness. He was not conscious of thought; it seemed only that a vivid picture was spread before his mind--the picture of a dark-blanketed bed on which, like a round black pool, there lay the coiled and sleeping cobra. The door of that room was shut, and a man entering it would no longer find, as he had done, a match-box ready to his hand, close beside the door.

For another hour he sat there, this mental picture starting from time to time into brilliant illumination, even as at the lightning flashes the landscape in front of him leaped into intolerable light and colour. The roar of the rain and the incessant tumult of the approaching thunder had roused the dogs, and by the flare of the storm Case could see that Boxer and his wife were both sitting tense and upright, staring uneasily into the night. Then simultaneously they both broke into chorus of deep-throated barking and strained at their chains. By the next flash Case saw what had roused their vigilance. The figure of a man with flapping coat was running at full speed from the direction of the mess-room towards the bungalow. He recognized who it was, and now the dogs recognized him, too, for their barking was exchanged for whimpers of welcome and agitated tails.

Oldham leaped the little hedge that separated the road from the fields and ran dripping into shelter of the veranda. In the gross darkness he could not see Case, and stood there, as he thought, alone, stripping off his mackintosh. Then, by the light of a fierce violet streamer in the clouds, he saw him.

“Hullo, Case,” he said, “is that you?”

Oldham moved towards him as he spoke, and by the next flash Case saw him close at hand, tall and slim, with handsome, boyish face.

“You got my letter?” asked Oldham.

“Yes, I got your letter.”

Case paused a moment.

“Do you expect me to congratulate you?” he asked.

“No, I can’t say that I do. But I want to say something, and I hope you won’t find it offensive. Anyhow, it is quite sincere. I am most awfully sorry for you. And I can’t forget that we used to be the greatest friends. I hope you can remember that, too.”

He sat down on the step that led into Case’s section of the bungalow, and in the darkness Case could hear Boxer making affectionate slobbering noises. That kindled a fresh point of jealous hatred in his mind; both dogs, who obeyed him as a master, adored Oldham as a friend. Hotly burned that hate, and he thought again of the closed bedroom door and the black pool on the blanket. Then he spoke slowly and carefully.

“I quite remember it,” he said, “and it seems to me the most amazing thing in the world. I can recall it all, all my--my love for you, and the day when we settled into this bungalow together, and the joy of it. I recall, too, that you have taken from me everything you could lay hands on, money, the affection of the dogs even----”

Oldham interrupted in sudden resentment at this injustice.

“As regards money, I may remind you, since you have chosen to mention it, that I have not succeeded in taking any away from you,” he remarked.

Case was not roused by this sarcasm; he could afford, knowing what he knew, to keep calm.

“I am sorry for having kept you waiting so long,” he said. “But you may remember that you begged me to pay you at my convenience. It will be quite convenient to-morrow.”

“My dear chap,” broke in Oldham again, “as if I would have mentioned it, if you hadn’t!”

Case felt himself scarcely responsible for what he said; the tension of the storm, the infernal tattoo of the rain, the heat, the bellowing thunder, seemed to take demoniacal possession of him, driving before them the sanity of his soul.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mention it,” he said, “until you had sold my debt to some Jewish money-lender.”

In the darkness he heard Oldham get up.

“There is no use in our talking, if you talk like a madman,” he said.

The sky immediately above them was torn asunder, and a flickering spear of intolerable light stabbed downwards, striking a tree not a hundred yards in front of the bungalow, and for the moment the stupendous crack of the thunder drowned thought and speech alike. Boxer gave a howl of protest and dismay, and nestled close to Oldham, while Case, starting involuntarily from his chair, held his hands to his ears until the appalling explosion was over.

“Rather wicked,” he said, and poured himself out a dram of neat spirits.

That steadied him, and, recovering himself a little, he felt that he was behaving very foolishly in letting the other see the madness of his rage and resentment. It was far better that he should lull Oldham into an unsuspicious frame of mind; otherwise he might suspect, might he not, that something was prepared for him in his room? Others, subsequently, if they quarrelled, might guess that he himself had known what lay there ... but it was all dim and fantastic. Then the fancied cunning and caution of an unbalanced man who is at the same time ready to commit the most reckless violence took hold of him, and instantly he changed his tone. He must be quiet and normal; he must let things take their natural course, without aid or interference from himself.

“The storm has played the deuce with my nerves,” he said, “that and the news in your letter, and the sight of you coming like a wraith through the rain. But I won’t be a lunatic any longer. Sit down, Percy, and try to forgive all the wild things I have been saying. Of course, I don’t deny that I have had an awful blow. But, as you have reminded me, we used to be great friends. She and I were great friends, too, and I can’t afford to lose the two people I really care most about in the world, just because they have found each other. Let’s make the best of it; help me, if you can, to make the best of it.”

It was not in Oldham’s genial nature to resist such an appeal, and he responded warmly.

“I think that is jolly good of you,” he said, “and, frankly, I hate myself when I think of you. But, somehow, it isn’t a man’s fault when he falls in love. I couldn’t help myself; it came on me quite suddenly. It was as if someone had come quickly up behind me and pitched me into the middle of it. At one moment I did not care for her; at the next I cared for nothing else.”

Case had himself thoroughly in hand by this time. He even took pleasure in these reconciliatory speeches, knowing the completeness with which a revenge prepared without his planning should follow on their heels. Had a loaded pistol been ready to his hand, and he himself secure from detection, he would probably not have pulled the trigger on his friend, but it was a different matter that he should merely acquiesce in his walking in the dark into the room where death lay curled and ready to strike. That seemed to him to be the act of God; he was not responsible for it, he had not put the cobra there.

“I felt sure it must have happened like that,” he said. “Besides, as you know, Kitty and I had quarrelled and had broken our engagement off. Of course, I hoped that some day we might come together again--at least, I know now that I hoped it. But that was nothing to do with you. You fell in love with her, and she with you. Yes, yes. Really, I don’t wonder. Indeed--indeed, I do congratulate you--I congratulate you both.”

Oldham gave a great sigh of pleasure and relief.

“It’s ripping of you to take it like that,” he said. “I hardly dared to hope you would. Thanks ever so much--ever so much! And now, do you know, I think I shall go to bed. I am dog-tired. I had a six hours’ ride to the station this morning, and even up there it was hideously hot.”

Case again reminded himself that he must behave naturally--not plan anything, but not interfere.

“Oh, you must have a drink,” he said, “though I’m afraid there is no ice. I’ll get you a glass and soda.”

He came out into the veranda again with these requisites. Oldham was stifling a prodigious yawn.

“I’m half dead with sleep. Probably I shall chuck myself on my bed just as I am, to save the trouble of undressing.”

Case felt his hand tremble as he put the glass down on the table.

“I know that feeling,” he said. “Sometimes, when one is very sleepy, the sight of a bed is altogether too much for one. I dare say I shall do the same. Help yourself to whisky while I open the soda for you.”

Oldham drank his peg and again rose.

“Well, I’m for bed,” he said. “And I can’t tell you what a relief it is to me to find you like this. By the way, about that bit of money. Pay me exactly when it’s convenient to you--next year or the year after, if you like. I should be wretched if I thought you were putting yourself about over it. So good night, Reggie.”

He turned to go, and it seemed to Case that hours passed and a thousand impressions were registered on his brain as he walked down the twenty-five feet of veranda that separated the two doors of entrance that led into their quarters. Outside, another change had come over the hot, tumultuous night, and, as if the very moon and stars were concerned in this pigmy drama, where but a single life out of the innumerable and infinitesimal little denizens of the world was involved, a queer triangular rent had opened in the rain-swollen sky, and a dim moon and a company of watery stars stared silently down, and to Case’s excited senses they appeared hostilely witnessing. Ten minutes ago the rain had ceased as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, and, except for the tom-tom that still beat monotonously in the town, a silence of death prevailed. The steam rose thick as sea-mist from the ground; above it a blurred etching of trees appeared and the roof of the mess-room. The grey unreal light shone full into the veranda, and he could see that Boxer was sitting bolt upright on his blanket-bed, looking at Oldham’s retreating figure. Daisy was industriously scratching her neck with a hind-leg, and from the table a little pool of spilt soda-water was dripping on to the ground.

All this Case noticed accurately and intently, and, as yet, Oldham was not half-way down the veranda. Once he hung on his step and sniffed the hot, stale air. That was a characteristic trick; he wrinkled his nose up like a dog, showing his white teeth. Once he shifted his dripping mackintosh from right hand to left, holding it at arm’s length. Then, as he turned to pass into the door, he made a little staccato sign of salutation to Case with his disengaged hand. Boxer appropriated that, and wagged a cordial tail in response.

Eagerly and expectantly, now that he had vanished from sight, Case followed his movements, visualizing them. He heard him shuffle his feet along the floor in the manner of a man feeling his way in the dark, and knew that he was drawing near to the closed bedroom door and the black interior. Oldham had said that he was very tired, that he was inclined just to throw himself on the bed and sleep, and the absence of matches and the added inconvenience of undressing in the dark would further predispose him to this. He would throw himself on the bed all in a piece, after the fashion of a tired man, and awake to fury the awful bedfellow, with the muscular coils and the swift death that lay crouched beneath its hood, which lay sleeping there. To-morrow there would be no debt for Case to pay, no gnawing of unsatisfied hate, and for Oldham no letter to his lady with the so satisfactory account of the evening’s meeting.

Then from within came the rattle of a turned door-handle, and Case knew that the death-chamber stood open. There followed a pause of absolute stillness, in which Case felt utterly detached from and irresponsible for whatever might follow. Then came the jar of a closed door....

And that tore him screaming from his murderous dreams, from which, perhaps, he had awoke too late. He found himself, with no volition of his own, running down the veranda and calling at the top of his voice:

“Percy, Percy,” he cried, “come out. There is a cobra on your bed!”

He heard the handle rattle and the door bang. Next moment he was on his knees in the dark lobby, clasping Oldham’s legs in a torrent of hysterical sobbing.

THE FALSE STEP

Mrs. Arthur Bolney Ross, when, three years ago, she set sail, or, rather, set screw, for England, had no very clear idea of the campaign she intended to wage there, though a firm determination to win it, and had mentally arrived at no general plan beyond those preliminary manœuvres which our charming American invaders usually adopt when they first effect a landing on the primitive pavements of Piccadilly. She had, in fact, taken half a dozen rooms at the Ritz Hotel and a box on the grand tier of the Covent Garden Opera House. But she had also, for the six months preceding her expedition, secretly received daily lessons on the pronunciation and idioms of that particular (and, as she thought, peculiar) dialect of the English language which was in vogue among the section of the English-speaking race with whom she intended to have dealings.

Rightly or wrongly, she had decided that the screaming drawl of New York, which a few years before had so captivated the English upper classes, and had led to so many charming and successful marriages, was now out of date, and would enchant no longer. So instead of being content with her expressive native speech, she learned with almost passionate assiduity the mumbling English diction, the inaudible Victorian voice, which she rightly considered would be a novelty to those who had so largely abandoned it themselves in favour of a more strident utterance. But she did not, in mastering the Victorian voice and intonation, suffer her knowledge of her native tongue and its blatant delivery to wither from misuse; she but became bi-lingual, and schooled her vocal cords to either register without in the least confusing the two.

It was in this point that she showed herself a campaigner of no stereotyped order, but one who might go far, who intended in any case to go further than anybody else. The idea was brilliant. Others before her had become more English than the English, and had done well; others had remained more American than the Americans, and had done even better. But she, among the immense bales of her luggage, brought with her this significant little handbag, so to speak: she could sound American or English at will. She could say without stumbling, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” or “How are you?” just as she pleased. And in this, so it seems to her historian, lay the germ of her success, and also the seeds of her final and irretrievable disaster, for in spite of her modulated voice and acquired idiom, she remained American in thought, with the regal impulses of a queen in Newport.

In other respects she was not, on her first landing, different in kind from our ordinary hospitable invaders. She had a real Arthur Bolney Ross in the background, who was capable of being shown and tested, if, so to speak, she was “searched,” but who, since his mind had in the course of years become nothing more nor less than a mint, out of which streams of bullion perpetually issued, preferred to be left alone for the processes of production. Amelie was excellent friends with him, when they had time and inclination to meet, and it always gave her a comfortable feeling to know that Arthur was in existence. If they had met very often, it is probable that they would have got on each other’s nerves, and, since she had an immense fortune of her own, have considered the desirability of a divorce; but in the meantime Amelie decidedly liked the feeling of stability which her husband gave her. She did not think about him much, but she knew he was there.

Husbands, she had ascertained, were going to be fashionable in London this year, or, if not exactly fashionable, were going to be “worn” in the manner of some invisible but judicious part of the dress, like a cholera belt, or, as Amelie would have called it when she spoke American, a gripe-girdle. Pearls also were worn, though not so invisibly as husbands, and Amelie had five superb ropes of these, which could be verified by anybody, and never got on her nerves at all. She had also, among her general equipment, a very excellent sort of social godmother, Lady Brackenbury, who, for a remuneration that made no difference to Amelie, but a good deal to her, was prepared to exert herself to the utmost pitch of her very valuable capabilities in the matter of bringing people to see her and in taking her to see people, and in preventing the wrong sort of people from having any sort of access to her. Amelie was willing to put herself into Lady Brackenbury’s hands with the complete confidence in which she would have entrusted her mouth to a reliable dentist, had her admirable teeth demanded any sort of adjustment. She could not have made a wiser choice: there was nobody, in fact, among possible godmothers in London, who would have been a sounder sponsor.

The two had met eighteen months before in New York, and subsequently, in the summer, Violet Brackenbury had spent a month with her friend at her cottage at Newport, which exteriorly resembled an immense Swiss chalet, and inside was like a terminus hotel. There, on ground for ever afterwards more historic than Marathon, had been fought the famous sixteen days’ war, in which Amelie had so signally defeated and deposed the reigning queen of the very smartest set of New York society.

The point to be decided, of course, was which of the two could give the most ludicrous, extravagant, and delirious parties, and thus be acclaimed sovereign among hostesses. Amelie, as challenger, had flung the gauntlet in the shape of a midnight lawn-tennis party, with hundreds of arc lamps hung above the courts, the nets covered with spangles, and the lines made of ground glass faintly illuminated by electric lights beneath, while, by way of contrast with this brilliance, a number of men dressed like mourners at a funeral, with top-hats and black scarves, picked up and presented the lawn-tennis balls to her guests in coffin-shaped trays. Here was a high bid for supremacy, and it was felt that Mrs. Cicero B. Dace would have to do something great in order to eclipse the brightness and originality of this entertainment. But bright and original she was, and when, two nights later, she gave her marvellous canary ball, it was thought that her throne had not yet tottered. On this occasion her admiring guests were thrilled to find that all round the walls of her ballroom had been planted mimosa trees, among the branches of which three thousand canaries had been let loose, after being doped with hard-boiled egg soaked in rum and water. These chirped and sang in a feverish and intoxicated manner. At the end of the ball the men of the party, dressed as huntsmen and armed with air-guns, shot these unfortunate songsters and presented the spoils to their partners in the cotillion.

Amelie had two answers to that--the first an indignant letter, printed in large type throughout the American press, denouncing this massacre, and the second another ball. The letter Mrs. Cicero B. Dace did not object to at all, since it but enhanced her notoriety, but she objected to the ball very much indeed, since Amelie’s ingenious mind hit on the simple and exquisite plan of dispensing with the band, and having in its place a choir of three hundred singers, who, in batches of one hundred at a time, sang the dance tunes. The effect was contagious, and dancers joined in also, producing, as the press said, the “most stupendously lyrical effect since the days of Sappho.”

Then Mrs. Cicero B. Dace sat down and thought again, lighting upon the famous idea of the auction ball, in which a real English Duke acted as auctioneer, and before each dance put up the ladies for auction, to be bid for by the men who wished to be their partners. But Amelie swiftly sent for Arthur Bolney Ross, and he and a friend of hers, who was backing her in this struggle for sovereignty, continued to bid for her for so long that, out of sinister compassion for her hostess, she stepped down from the rostrum and refused to dance with either, for fear that there should be no more dancing for anybody. This completely spoiled the success of the auction ball, and while Mrs. Cicero B. Dace was still staggering from its failure, Amelie annihilated her altogether by giving her inimitable glacier ball on the hottest night of the year. A refrigerating apparatus was rigged up on the walls of her ballroom, and their entire surface thickly coated with real ice. Glass channels, fringed with blue gentians, were made round the margin of the floor, to carry off the melting water, while accomplished members of the band yodelled at intervals to carry out the Swiss illusion. She and the auctioneer Duke--whom she had captured from under the nose of Mrs. Cicero B. Dace--dressed in knickerbockers, with a rope round his shoulder and an ice-axe in his hand, led the cotillion, and Mrs. Cicero B. Dace, having in vain tried to point out that the gentians were three parts artificial flowers, retired at 1 A.M. in floods of tears.

Such were Amelie Ross’s social achievements when, unlike Alexander the Great, she bethought herself that there were more worlds to conquer, and decided to extend her dominions over England. Her godmother, of course, knew her history, having, indeed, assisted at the history she had already made, and on the night of her arrival at the Ritz Hotel, dined with her there in her charming room looking over the Green Park, before going with her to her box at the opera. As regards this first appearance of her god-daughter, Violet Brackenbury had laid her plans very carefully, and explained them as they dined.

“I have asked nobody else at all, dear Amelie,” she said, “because I want everybody to be wild to find out who you are, and nobody will be able to say. Curiosity is the best sauce of all.”

Amelie became thoroughly American for a moment.

“My!” she said. “Don’t you mean that your folk over here haven’t seen hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me in the papers?”

“Probably not one, my dear. And I’ve only told one woman that you are coming. You are going to burst on everybody to-night, you and your lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you’ve got. I want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the dance at Alice Middlesex’s, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is to-night. She is the one person I have told.”

“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie.

“Yes; and she is quite certain to ask you if you know Lady Creighton, that dreadful countrywoman of yours who is climbing into London like a monkey and hopping about it like a flea. She tried to patronize Alice, and Alice won’t get over it either in this world or the next. So tell her that Lady Creighton is not received in New York--which I believe is the case, isn’t it?--and look very much surprised at the idea of knowing her. I can’t tell you how important that is.”

Amelie frowned slightly.

“But Elsie Creighton telephoned to me half an hour ago,” she said, “asking me to lunch with her to-morrow to meet----”

“It doesn’t matter whom she asked you to meet. If she asked you to meet the entire Royal Family, you would be wise to refuse. You don’t want to climb into London on the top of a hurdy-gurdy.”

“My! What’s a hurdy-gurdy?” asked Amelie, whose English lessons had not taught her that word.

“Hurdy-gurdy? Street organ. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know people, if you understand; you want to make people want to know you. My plan is not that you should climb up, but that you should spread down.”

Amelie instantly caught this.

“I see,” she said. “I’m to begin at the top. But Elsie Creighton said there was a Prince coming to lunch to-morrow. I thought that was a good beginning.”

“Not so good as the Creighton woman is bad. Did you accept, by the way?”

“Why, yes.”

“Then telephone to-morrow exactly at lunch-time to say you are ill, and lunch with me very obviously downstairs in the restaurant. In fact, it couldn’t have happened better. It will mark you off very definitely from her and her crowd. I don’t mean to say that there are not charming people among it, but it would never do to enter London under her wing. Perhaps just at present, darling, you had better ask me before you accept invitations. It is so important to cut the right people.”

Amelie was completely cordial over this.

“I expect that is what I have got to learn,” she said. “And now for to-night--will my dress do?”

Lady Brackenbury regarded this admirable costume and shook her head.

“No, I don’t think it will,” she said. “It is lovely, but you want something more arresting. You, with your wonderful complexion, can stand anything. Orange, now--haven’t you got a hit-in-the-face of orange? I want everybody to be forced to look at you, and you’ll do the rest. You see I have made myself as plain and inconspicuous as possible, to act as a foil. It is noble of me, but then I am noble. And all the pearls, please, just all the pearls, with the big diamond fender on your head. To-morrow, at the French Embassy, you shall wear the simplest gown you have got, and one moonstone brooch, price three-and-sixpence.”

* * * * *

Such was the opening of Amelie’s amazing campaign, the incidents and successes of which followed swift and bewildering. Under Violet’s capable guidance she began, not by collecting round her that brisk and hungry section of well-born London which is always ready to sing for its dinner, and by giving huge entertainments to bring together a crowd at all costs, but by attracting and attaching a small band of the people who mattered. Lady Brackenbury knew very well that even in the most democratic town in the world certain people, not necessarily Princes or Prime Ministers, were large pieces in the great haphazard game of chess; the crowd meantime, after whom Amelie secretly hankered, would only get more eager to be admitted. In particular, Lady Creighton starved for her entry. She asked Amelie to dine any Tuesday in June, when she was giving her series of musical parties, but Amelie found, to her great regret, that she was engaged on all those festive occasions. But she gave a musical party herself--London was prey this year to a disordered illusion that it liked music--and Melba and Caruso sang there--informally, so it seemed, just happening to sing--to not more than fifty people, who sat in armchairs at their ease, instead of elbowing each other in squashed and upright rows. In vain did Lady Creighton spread an assiduous report that the artists had sung out of tune and that the peaches were sour. Everyone knew that she had not been there, and that she alluded to another sort of fruit. Violet Brackenbury was successful in persuading Amelie not to send any account of this brilliant little affair to the papers, and to refuse all scraps to the writers for the press. But she was careful to provide for a far more telling publicity.

Gradually, craftily, a reef at a time, Violet allowed her friend to let out her sails. She left her flat at the Ritz and rurally installed herself in a spacious house in the middle of Regent’s Park. There was a big field attached to the house, and, yielding to a severe attack of Americanism, which she thought it might be dangerous to suppress, Violet permitted her to give a haymaking party of the Newport type. Hay was brought in from the country and scattered over the field, and mixed up with roses and gardenias, while the guests on arrival were presented with delightful little ebony pitchforks with silver prongs, or cedar-wood rakes. But this symptom caused her a little uneasiness, for it was obvious that Amelie thought her haymaking party a much brighter achievement than the previous concert.

* * * * *

The expansion continued. Amelie and her friend strolled into Christie’s one morning, and found a tussle going on between two eminent dealers over the possession of a really marvellous string of pearls. At a breathless pause, after the first “Going!” that followed a fresh bid, Amelie said in her most ringing American voice, “I guess I’ll sail in right now,” and began bidding herself. The crowd of dilettante London, which delights in seeing other people spend large sums of money, parted for her, and she moved gloriously up the auction-room and took her stand just behind one of the Mosaic little gentlemen who wanted the pearls so badly.

The recognition of her spread through the place like spilled quicksilver, and the auctioneer, with an amiable bow, caused the pearls to be handed to her for her inspection. With them still in her hand, as if it was not worth while returning them to the tray, she sky-rocketed the price by three exalting bids, the third of which was as a fire-hose on the ardour of her competitors. Her cheque-book was fetched from her car outside, and she left the room a moment afterwards, having drawn her cheque on the spot, pausing only to clasp the pearls round her neck.... And Violet, with a strange sinking of the heart, felt as if her pet tiger-cub had tasted blood again after the careful and distinguished diet on which she had been feeding it.

Amelia had a fancy to leave London early in July, and give a few parties at an immense house she had taken near Maidenhead for the month. She had had some gondolas sent over from Venice, with their appropriate gondoliers, and London found it very pleasant to float about after dinner, while the excellent string band played in an illuminated barge that accompanied the flotilla. Exciting little surprises constantly happened, such as the arrival one evening of artists from the Grand Guignol, who played a couple of thrilling little horrors in the ballroom, while on another night the great Reynolds picture belonging to the Duke of Middlesex was found to have put in an appearance on the walls. Amelie said that it was her birthday present to her husband, and made no further allusion to it. The frame had gone to be repaired, and it was draped round in clouds of silvery-grey chiffon that extended half over the wall. And had Violet Brackenbury known the outrage that her friend had planned, the frenzy of suppressed Newportism that was ready to break forth, it is probable that she would gladly have returned the cheque which she had that morning received from Amelie.

As it was, she felt wholly at ease, and inclined to congratulate herself on the unique and signal character of Amelie’s success. Never before, so she thought, had a woman so dominated the season; never, certainly, had one of her countrywomen so “mattered.” And all this, with the exception, perhaps, of the haymaking party and the incident of the pearls at Christie’s, had been gained in quiet, unsensational ways; and, lulled to content, she did not realize that the spirit that inspired the queen of hostesses was ready to flare up like an access of malarial fever. Poor unsuspecting godmother, who fondly believed that those gondolas from Venice, those Grand Guignol artists from Paris, this gem of Reynolds’s pictures, were a safety-valve, not guessing that they were but as oil poured on the flame!

The cotillion that night was to begin at twelve. Amelie was leading it herself with one of the Princes, and the big ballroom was doubly lined with seated guests, when on the stroke of twelve she entered, dressed in exact facsimile of the glorious Reynolds. As she advanced with her partner into the middle of the room, the band in the gallery struck up, and simultaneously a tongue of fire shot through the flimsy draperies round the picture, instantly enveloping it in flames. The canvas blistered and bubbled, and in ten seconds the finest Reynolds in the world was a sheet of scorched and blackened rag.

The crowd leaped to its feet, but before the panic had time to mature, the cause of it was over. There was nothing inflammable within range of the swiftly-consumed chiffon, and only little fragments of burned-out ash floated on to the floor. But the fervent and instantaneous heat had done its work.

Then for a moment there was dead silence, and Amelie’s voice was heard in its quietest, most English tones.

“Oh, isn’t that a pity!” she said.

Then arose a sudden hubbub of talk, drowning the sound of the band, which, at a signal from Amelie, had started again.

* * * * *

Violet stood with her friend before the blackened canvas next morning in the empty room, drawing on her gloves.

“I don’t think you understand yet the effect of what you have done,” she said. “No one doubts that the fire was intentional, and--and I think that Lady Creighton will be of more use to you in the future than I can possibly be.”

SPOOK STORIES

THE CASE OF FRANK HAMPDEN

There was a light visible from the chinks and crevices of drawn curtains in the window of Dr. Roupert’s study as I passed it on my way back from dinner one night. He lived some six doors farther up the same street as I, and since it had long been a frequent custom for us to smoke the “go-to-bed” cigarette together, I rang and asked if he was at leisure. His servant told me that he had already sent a message across to my house, asking me to look in on him if I got home while the evening was not too far advanced for a casual conversational quarter of an hour; and accordingly I took off my coat, and went straight into the pleasant little front room, about which hung the studious fragrance of the books that lined it from floor to ceiling.

Arthur Roupert was not alone this evening; there was sitting on the near side of the fire, which sparkled prosperously in this clear night of early December frost, a young man whom I was sure I had never seen before. As I entered, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, turning towards the door, and I looked on the most handsome and diabolical face that I had ever beheld.

Simultaneously Roupert got up.

“I hoped you would look in,” he said. “Let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Hampden, who is spending a day or two with me. This is Mr. Archdale, Frank, of whom I was speaking just now.”

As the other rose, I saw that Roupert’s almost foolishly amiable fox-terrier shrank away from where she had been sitting by her master’s chair, instead of giving me her accustomed and effusive greeting, and retreated into a far corner of the room, where she sat quivering with raised hackles, and with vigilant eyes full of hate and terror fixed on young Hampden. His right arm was in a sling, and he held out his left hand to me.

“You must excuse me,” he said, “but I am only just recovering from a broken arm. My cousin’s dog doesn’t approve of it; she would like to get her teeth into it.”

“The oddest thing I ever saw, Archdale,” said Roupert. “You know Fifi’s usual amiability. Call her, Frank.”

Frank Hampden whistled, and clicked his fingers together in an encouraging manner.

“Fifi--come here, Fifi!” he said.

For a moment I thought that this most confiding of ladies was going to fly at him. But apparently she could not find the courage for an attack, and, snapping and growling, retreated behind the window curtains.

“And that to me,” said Hampden, licking his lips as he spoke. “Me, who adore dogs. Don’t you, Mr. Archdale?”

As he said that I knew that he lied; that Fifi’s detestation of him was met with a hatred quite as vivid but more controlled. I can no more account for that conviction than for the sense of hellish evil that my first glance at him had conveyed to me. He was quite young, twenty-two or twenty-three for a guess, and yet from behind the mask of that soft boyish face there looked out a spirit hard and malignant and mature, an adept in terrible paths. The impression was quite inexplicable but perfectly clear. Then, looking across to Roupert, I saw he was watching his cousin with eager intentness.

I had to answer the direct question he had put to me, but it required an effort to speak to him or to look at him.

“No; personally I don’t care about dogs,” I said. “I rather dislike them, and so enjoy a most unwelcome popularity among them. Fifi, for instance: your cousin will tell you how blind is her adoration for me!”

“See if Fifi will come to you if I stand by you,” said Hampden. Fifi had half-emerged from her ambush behind the curtains, and I called to her. But she would not leave the retreat where her rage and terror had driven her. She gave a little apologetic whine, as if to signify that I was asking an impossible thing, and beat with her stumpy tail on the carpet.

“Now go back to your chair again, Frank,” said Roupert.

Fifi needed no further invitation when he had left my neighbourhood. She bundled herself across the room to me, her thin white body curled like a comma, wriggling with delight and making incomprehensible little explanations of her previous conduct. But the moment that Hampden moved in his chair, she bolted away from me again.

He laughed and got up.

“Well, I think I shall go to bed now that you have come to keep Arthur company,” he said. “By the way, where’s your cat, Arthur? I haven’t seen her about all day.”

He was facing sideways to Roupert as he spoke, and I noticed that he did not turn his head towards him. This gave a certain casual cursory tone to his question, making it appear a mere careless inquiry.

“I haven’t seen her either,” said Roupert. “Perhaps, after taking counsel with Fifi, she has thought it prudent to fly from your baleful presence. Good night, Frank. Can you manage for yourself with your bandaged arm, or shall I come and help you?”

“Oh, I’m all right, thanks,” he said; “good night. A kind good night, Fifi. We shall be good friends before long.”

* * * * *

Arthur Roupert had retired some two years before from regular medical practice, in which, as all the world knows, he was undoubtedly the first authority on disease and aberrations of the brain and nervous system, devoting his attention more particularly to those riddles of obscure and baffling disorders to which he so often supplied strange and correct answers. He was possessed of an ample competence, and so, finding that his large professional practice did not permit him the leisure which was necessary for these exploratory studies, he had, though always willing to be consulted by his colleagues, thrown up an active career for one of research. He wanted to learn rather than to practise, and without precisely mistrusting the methods which had earned him so brilliant a success, had inferred the presence of huge fields of the unknown, huge expanses of further possibilities which would perhaps put utterly out of date the most advanced of theories and treatments hitherto recognized in his profession. At the time of his retirement he had once talked to me about the uncharted seas on to which he proposed to push forth.

“The most advanced of actual practitioners,” he said, “are but groping in the dark on the threshold of real knowledge, feeling for the handle, fumbling for the bell. At the most, that is to say, in cases of brain disease and nerve disorder we try to get at the mind of the patient, and influence that, so that it, not we, may exert its healing power, and cure the imperfect functioning of the material part. Of course that is a tremendous step forward when we look at what medical science was twenty years ago, when doctors prescribed tonics, tonics to heal the physical damage caused by a disordered mind. But mind itself is but a very subordinate denizen in that house of mystery which we call man.

“Mind is no more than the servant who comes to the door, and takes your hat and coat, and tells you in a word or two how the patient has been. Mind is not the master of the house, whom you have really come to see, and who sits there alone, mortally sick, perhaps, and in terror and darkness for the master of the house is the spirit. We have got to examine him before we can touch the source of these diseases. For the farther that science advances, the more certain it is that there is a master sitting within to whom the mind is only the servant. As for the body, the tissues, the nerves, the grey matter, what shall we say that is? Why, it’s no more than the servant’s clothes, his jacket, or his boots. I’m not going to stay talking in the hall to ‘mind,’ the servant, any longer. I shall leave him there, and go straight up to the sick-chamber. I shall be called all sorts of names--charlatan, spiritualist, what you will--but I don’t care two straws about that. Besides, I know quite well that my colleagues will still be glad to call me in when they are puzzled, and I hope to be better equipped to help them.... I won’t reject any jungle-path without exploring it, not witchcraft, nor demoniacal possession, nor all the myths which science thinks she has exploded. In its first origin everything must be spiritual, be it comet or toothache or genius. Just as mental suggestion has taken the place of tonics, so must spiritual healing take the place of mental suggestion. The spirit is the original manifestation of God in man, and it is on prayer and on faith that the whole science of healing will some day rest. But first we have to investigate the conditions, the environment, the life....”

For these two years, then, which had followed his retirement, Roupert had given himself to these studies of occult and spiritual influences, learning about the healing powers contained in mental suggestion, and trying to get behind that into the more elemental and essential mysteries of man; leaving the servant, as he had said, in the hall of the house, while he went further into the presence of the master of the house. Often, during these “go-to-bed” cigarettes that multiplied themselves into the night, he told me tales that did not make going to sleep any easier. Nothing was too extravagant for his investigations; witchcraft, spiritualism, Satanism, the healing touch, and, above all, demoniacal possession were the subjects of this study that went deeper into the human organism than mind. There was no myth or exploded superstition that he did not examine, to see whether the explosion had been complete and shattering, or whether among the débris there did not remain some grains of solid stuff that were still solid, though science had affirmed that a puff of scattered smoke was all that was extant.... Consequently this evening, when Frank Hampden had gone to bed, I was quite prepared to find that Roupert had something to tell, some guess to hazard that had illumined his inquiries, the more so indeed because I had not seen him for some dozen nights.

“Did you receive the message I left at your house?” he asked abruptly as the door closed behind his cousin.

“No; I haven’t been home. But your servant told me you had asked me to come in,” said I.

“Yes, I did. You have done just what I wanted. In my note I asked you to come in and observe my cousin, and tell me your impression. I saw you couldn’t help observing him, so now let us have the impression.”

“Quite frankly? All?” I said.

“Of course.”

“I never saw anyone so utterly terrible,” I said.

“Terrible? Exactly how?” he asked.

The very intensity of my feeling about Hampden blurred the outline of it, and I paused trying to put a definite shape to it.

“Incomparably terrible,” I said. “Murderous, I think: murderous for the fun of it. I felt like Fifi.”

“I saw you did,” he said; “and I suspect you are right, you and Fifi....”

He walked up and down the room once or twice, then sat down with the air of settling himself.

“Did you hear him ask about my cat?” he said. “He killed her last night; he buried her in the garden.”

There was a grotesqueness, a ludicrousness even in this after the talk of murder, but that only added horror to it.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Precisely what I say. It so happened that I slept very badly last night, because, as a matter of fact, I was thinking about Frank, and wondering if I was on the horrible track which would show me what ailed him. About three in the morning I heard the door into the garden being opened: the window of my bedroom, which was open, is just above it. The idea of burglars occurred to me, and, without turning on my light, I went and looked out. There was bright clear starlight, and I saw Frank come out of the house carrying something white in his arm. He put it down to fetch a spade from the tool-house, and I saw what it was. He dug up a couple of plants with lumps of soil round their roots, working slowly, for he could only use one arm. He buried the cat in the excavation, and very carefully replanted the Michaelmas daisies over it. Then, more terribly yet, he knelt down by the grave, and I could hear him sobbing.”

“Sobbing?” I asked.

“Yes. What he said to-night is, or was, perfectly true. He used to be devoted to dogs and, indeed, all animals, especially cats.... Now last night, out in the garden, he was in his dressing-gown. Well, when he came down to breakfast this morning he said his nose had been bleeding rather severely. He was uneasy about it, and I went up to his bedroom and found a good deal of blood in his slop-pail. His dressing-gown was lying on his bed, and there, too, was more blood and a quantity of cat’s hairs. I told him not to think about it any more; there was nothing in the least alarming, and when he had gone out, in order to make quite sure, I dug up the Michaelmas daisies for the second time. Below, I found the body of my poor cat. He had cut its throat.... He would kill Fifi if he could; he is longing to.”

“But the fellow is a fiend!” said I.

“For the present he is a fiend, or something very like it. He used not to be until the day on which he broke his arm. Pray God he will cease being what he is.”

“Till the day he broke his arm?” I asked.

“Yes. Now do you want to hear the wildest and most extravagant tale, which I believe to be literally and awfully true?”

“Concerning this?” I asked.

“Of course. Also, are you disposed to sit up late to-night? There may be some confirmatory evidence about my story. I expect Reid, the medium, here at twelve. There is time for me to give you my theory before he comes.”

“Till any hour,” said I.

“Good. Then listen.”

He spoke slowly, putting his hands over his eyes, as he so often does when he wants to shut out all external disturbances and concentrate himself on the history of a case.

“Two months ago,” he said, “as you may possibly remember, a man called James Rolls was hanged at Beltonborough for the most atrocious murder of his wife. The deed apparently was quite objectless; there had been no quarrel, and after it was done he seemed sometimes to be distressed at the crime, sobbing and crying, sometimes to gloat over it, recounting it with gusto. There was no question whatever about his guilt, only about his sanity, and with regard to that these fits of remorse and enjoyment might be assumed in order to produce the impression that he was not accountable for his actions. He was examined by a Government expert, who asked me to come down with him and form my conclusion. We could neither of us find any other symptom of insanity about him. But there was a certain conjecture in my head about what we call the history of the case, and I stopped down at Beltonborough for a day or two in order to make further observations.

“As I was having an interview with him, I suddenly asked him this question, ‘Did you begin by killing flies?’ Usually he was rather sullen and silent, and often would not answer; but when I asked him this, his eye brightened, and he said, ‘Yes, flies first, and then cats and dogs.’ After that I could get nothing further out of him, but I had got what I expected to get. In all other respects he was, as far as I could judge, perfectly sane, and it was scarcely possible to call him a homicidal maniac, for he had never before shown signs of wanting to take human life. As it was, he had committed an atrocious murder, and had he been shut up as a homicidal maniac, I do not think there is any doubt that by this time he would have killed a warder.

“Now no man in a fit of rage is altogether sane, and yet we do not commute the sentence of those who have killed another when beside themselves with passion, and James Rolls had not even that extenuation. He was hanged.... But I feel convinced that Frank is suffering from an early stage of James Rolls’s malady; I feel convinced also that the hanging of James Rolls infected him with it.”

“The hanging of James Rolls caused it?” I asked.

“I do not doubt it, as you will see when I state my theory. But I hope to prove that my theory is correct, and I hope to cure my cousin.”

Roupert sat up and looked at me while he said this; then he sank back in his chair again, and, as before, covered his eyes with his hands.